You can try to explain away the stupid call all you want. The majority of the football watching (and coaching and playing) universe all agree that it was a stupid call. Add to that it was to Ricardo Lockette. With the Super Bowl game on the line do you go to one of your superstars? No, you go to a guy who had 11 receptions this year and has 18 receptions for his career. But I guess that was another way to fool the Patriots, right? Go to the guy who is least likely to get it in that situation.
If there’s one thing to be learned listening to top 40 radio, or during the time of a bad presidency, it’s that the majority aren’t always right. They’d gone to Lynch 5 times in that situation this season, he was 1 for 5 with a net -1 yard. So going to him really isn’t the obvious choice people want it to be. Or maybe it’s the too obvious choice other defense were expecting and stacking up against making it fail while the pas often succeeds.
They’d had success in the pass with unexpected receivers already. Mathews caught his first career pass in this SB. They don’t actually have any superstar receivers. Going to unexpected guys is a way to fool the other team, again Mathews, whose big catches opened up the game and turned it into a contest, had been cut TWICE this year and never been thrown to.
Hindsight is 20/20 and it’s easy to be a monday coach pointing out all the things that “obviously” were wrong because they didn’t work. But Pete’s got the job of making those calls BEFORE he knows the results, and those calls work for him more often than they don’t. This very call he made HAS worked for him in the past, which is why Bill found it in the tapes and practices against it.